Could this be the answer to the future of Data Management?

Zero Copy Data Access (ZCDA) is a new buzz word bouncing around the martech industry. ZCDA is essentially a method by which businesses can provide a copy of their data, without actually transmitting the data from origin. This has many other benefits of course, including satisfying any legal issues surrounding data soverentity, which become a headache for many global businesses… More on that in another post!

But today an increasing number of businesses are looking at ways to get their data from A to B in the most efficient and law abiding way - GDPR, CCPA, CCPR PECR and so many other acronyms all designed to keep you as a consumer of content safe, are actually hindering the way businesses can use their (your) data. Even in countries like the USA have internal challenges - of the 50 states, 1 state [California] has it’s own view on data privacy and how data can be handled - across the US!… So this has brought about new and creative ways for businesses not only in the USA, but across the planet to get data from A to B, without breaking any of those legal boundaries where data residency is concerned.

What does Zero Copy Data Access (ZCDA) mean?

We heard a lot in 2022 about the introduction of Data Cleanrooms and the benefit they bring to organisations. Today, ZCDA is essentially another version of that, allowing businesses to share their data whilst the data doesn’t actually leave its place of origin or indeed be copied anywhere else. In this case, we find Google is very much leading the way with its Big Query cloud hosted data warehouse and indeed other platforms that are able to connect with it (within our outside of the GCP ecosystem) are gaining tremendous insights into the power of data sharing. Not only does this method comply with data soverentity laws, but it also has another benefit - speed. Such practises means data is available in memory, not ever written to disk. Therefore platforms like GCP who are built on a Graph database (and not relational - so they already have the ‘upper hand’ when it comes to performance), are becoming even faster! Businesses are finding not only with platforms that need access to this data to make realtime decisions are performing better, but so are the analysts providing business insights from interactive and detailed business reports from the plethora of data ingress solutions to a central source, such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio and more.

Data stored in GCP BigQuery for example, can then be leveraged with Google’s AI platform, Vertex. Any platform that can leverage data to utlimately populate in BigQuery could have access to Vertex data models for AI, which could be trained on such data streams and shared back with those same systems - some of which already embrace ZCDA (meaning no data is moved and such data is made available directly).

What this could mean for CDPs in the future…

What this means for existing and more traditional CDPs of course is they are slowly becoming another data silo., the very problem they were iniitially trying to solve. Alternative examples such as ActionIQ, Lytics and Simon Data have Zero ETL (extract, transform, load) technology at the centre of what they offer to connect to external databases to integrate into audience builds and activation - this bit again is important, as it means no import (so no license implications for a traditional CDP vendor), no data sovereignty issues as no data is physically moved) and a by-product of this means speed - faster time to data and insights for activation and reporting!

What might be the future of Zero Copy Data Access (ZCDA)?

When you think about Web3 and ZCDA, this also begs the question, what this might mean for blockchains in the future. With the recent explosion in Artifical Intelligence (AI) and forever increasing adoption of blockchain technologies, could the combination of the two make data analysis and activation even more efficient? Remember, Blockchains generally catalog everything processed and are publicly available - meaning they can be queried, unlike the more traditional data streams... This opens up other opportunities surrounding better regulatation and sharing/reporting of data…

Still unsure of what ZCDA is and the benefit it can bring to your business with data governance and data sovereignty at the centre? If so, we'd love to discuss the options further with you!